Leighton S. James's well-researched study makes a welcome contribution to the growing literature on the experience of warfare in Central Europe during the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods. Readers of the Austrian History Yearbook should note that James incorporates all the German lands, including those of German-speakers from the Habsburg realm.
James's book focuses on three main themes. Above all, he aims to analyze the experiences of both soldiers and civilians across the German lands during the wars between 1792 and 1814, with consideration of how experiences varied according to region, social status, confession, and gender. He also engages debates about the transformation of warfare during this era and about the nature and extent of German nationalism and national identity. Chapters one and two provide background, covering the political and military history of the period and the changing cultural circumstances in which such large numbers of individuals would record their experiences. Chapters three and four concentrate on military figures, and chapters five and six on civilians, including questions of resistance.
Drawing on both published and archival letters, diaries, and memoirs, and inspired by Alltagsgeschichte and the history of war and society, James scrutinizes the experiences of less well-known individuals rather than those of famous publicists or memoirists, including common soldiers and civilians where possible. He traces the ways in which the narratives were shaped by various genres and emphasizes their literary qualities, with Paul Fussel's work on the memory of World War I as a point of reference and with considerable recourse to the Germanistik literature. Novels, picaresque adventures, fairy tales, and particularly travelogues featured as potential models for these accounts.
Regarding civilians, James argues that “military-civilian relations during the period were complicated and mixed” (10). He finds many instances of cooperation as well as exploitation, the latter as often by one's own armies as by foreign occupiers. Any resistance was usually low-key, and more likely to be motivated by pragmatic rather than patriotic concerns. James stays fairly close to the existing secondary literature on these matters and offers further illustrative examples from his collection of witness accounts.
In considering the changing nature of warfare in the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, James particularly queries whether the era already marked a shift toward total war, as argued in the work of David Bell, who finds that changing notions of peace and war in the decades spanning the Enlightenment and Revolution had produced a new ideologically driven culture of warfare in which the lines between civilians and military were blurred and in which wars were fought à outrance by large citizen armies rather than in the supposedly more gentlemanly and restrained fashion of the age of smaller-scale aristocratic warfare that preceded it. James contends that while one can see evidence of such a shift beginning to occur, particularly among literate elites, the older aristocratic way of viewing war persisted to a greater degree in the German lands and among German officers and soldiers than in Bell's France-focused study. Soldiers’ accounts of warfare therefore also still tended to emphasize the honorable nature of the enterprise or the pragmatic and instrumental necessity of fighting rather than a notion of war as sublime or “revelatory” experience that has also sometimes been taken to mark the new type of war and/or the Romantic sensibility of modern selfhood in the same period. Ultimately, James emphasizes the soldiers’ narratives’ concentration on the body and health, whether in the context of fighting, sickness, or diet. On balance, James does more to demonstrate continuities in how actors viewed or thought about warfare than he does to question the thesis of a shift to total war in the military and civilian experience of war generally, above all, with respect to the increased scale and intensity of military activity.
As regards German nationalism, James confirms the conclusions of recent scholars such as Karen Hagemann and Ute Planert that Prusso-centric German nationalism did not command much adherence at the time, falling well behind the claims of regional or dynastic loyalties and identifications. The Wars of Liberation did not, in other words, mark a “national awakening” in the way that publicists then or nationalist historians later liked to claim. Even Francophobia was more interlaced with positive images of the French in both soldiers’ and civilians’ accounts than earlier views would have it, and overall the Poles and peoples of the Russian empire or Spain came out worse on the scale of national stereotyping.
James ultimately offers nuanced coverage of a crucial and traumatic phase of Central European history. While the book is likely too expensive for use in class, one might well assign a chapter to help bring to life the experience of German-speaking soldiers or civilians during the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.
